My interview this week with Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner has gone viral — and rekindled a long-simmering debate about why America went from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That discourse is a reminder of how many Democratic politicians and their liberal fans have convinced themselves that Republicans and Democrats (including Obama himself) joining together to bail out bankers who were throwing 10 million families out of their homes had absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s rise.

They have created a fiction inside their mind pretending that for the first time in American history, a population was economically pulverized as oligarchs were given bailouts (that were never paid back) — but in their telling, all of that somehow never affected our country’s politics.

Are they right? It is an important question — so important that we decided to spend two years reporting on it for an audio series called Meltdown. It is important because this isn’t some academic argument about history. It is actually about the future, and about whether we are about to repeat the same cycle that originally led to Trump.

First, let’s understand some motives: Liberals and country club Republicans (“Never Trump Republicans”) need to believe Trump flipped 200+ Obama counties for any and every other reason than the economic cataclysm of the late 2000s and the government’s pathetically weak response to it. They need to believe that because that way, they can still tell themselves that we can go back to a pre-Trump “normal” of professional liberals and country club Republicans getting rich in yuppie information economy gigs while working-class voters are economically massacred by both parties’ deregulation, free trade, and neoliberalism.